Tag: Tories

Ever since Thatcher introduced Right to Buy, and then Blair super-heated the housing market with a combination of cheap loans and mass immigration, home ownership has become ever more of a sticky wicket for the Tories. On the one hand, Tory voting has historically been associated with home ownership: people with something to lose are typically more conservative. On the other hand though, in order to sustain the pleasantly rising house prices that keep the core Tory base contented (and the cheap money flowing, as people remortgage to pay for extensions, kids’ university fees or whatever) it becomes ever harder for younger generations to join the home-owning ranks of the putatively Tory.

Mulling this over, it struck me that there’s a second, more profound way that the late twentieth-century transformation of homes into part loan collateral, part asset class, part status symbol has left conservatism with a dilemma. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the way Brexit was functioning as a proxy war within the Tory Party over which the party valued more: free market dogma or social conservatism. I think my analysis still holds, and indeed that the only thing that has changed is that social conservatives are now losing, and leaving the Tory Party in droves. The housing issue, it seems to me, encapsulates the nature of this conflict in a nutshell.

Here’s why: if you see your house purchase primarily as an asset class, you’re not buying with the intent to settle and make a home there. You’ll do the place up, sell it on and move. No need to get to know the neighbours, form networks, get involved in community activities. Probably best if your kids don’t put down too many local roots or it’ll be a wrench for them to leave their friends. Homes-as-asset-class is the quintessential Anywhere (Goodhart) mindset, that treats a place as a set of resources to be consumed, developed, improved, but which are ultimately that: resources. Not networks, not reciprocal obligations, not really a home. Conversely, if you buy somewhere as a Somewhere, with the intent to put down roots and make a home there – to be there for the rest of your life or at least the foreseeable future – you can’t really treat your home as an asset class because it’s about the least liquid asset imaginable. OK, if house prices rise you’ll benefit a bit in theory, because maybe you can take out a loan against the imagined gain in value of your house but again, that’s only really meaningful if you’re planning to sell.

Now, I’m being a bit reductive but returning to the Conservatives, your Anywheres are all for free market liberalism – and your Somewheres are all for social conservatism. For many years, the two managed to coexist well enough within the same party, united – perhaps – by a broad consensus (for different reasons) that taxation and public spending should be restrained. But if the issue of European Union membership has been the most visible evidence of that truce collapsing, the breakdown both predates and is more profound than ‘banging on about Europe’ would suggest.

We’ve reached a point now where the demands of the free market are becoming ever more inimical to the needs of the kind of settled community that nurtures and values social conservatism. The kind of worldview that values the free market understands a house as primarily an investment, and invests him or herself in the local community in proportion to that understanding – ie lightly if at all. This is profoundly at odds with the kind of worldview that places value on continuity, community, a sense of place and tradition. Thus while both these groups may place a value on home ownership, it is for radically different reasons: and these two strands of conservatism are increasingly at odds.

Fundamentally, the Conservative Party has acted for some decades as though free market ideology were compatible with a belief in patriotism, conservative social values and a healthy civic society. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this is no longer the case. The profound sociocultural conflict and difference in outlook – and hence spending behaviour, political assumptions and fundamental approach to life – emblematic in the difference between a Somewhere who wishes to buy a house as a home, to live in and care for within the context of a rooted and socially-engaged local existence, and an Anywhere who wishes to buy a house as an investment, with the aim of moving on once it is financially viable, encapsulates this irreducible fracture. It is increasingly apparent that the Conservative Party cannot serve both. It is also increasingly apparent that, if one group has to go, it will not be the Anywheres. So the question is: who will speak for lower middle class Somewheres, when – as is now inevitable – they begin to flex their political muscles somewhere other than the Tory Party?